SERBIA

Following the secession of several of the former Yugoslav federal states, Yugoslavia was reconstituted in 1992 as a federation of the two republics of Serbia and Montenegro.

The official topographic mapping agency remains the Military Geographical Institute (Savezna Geodetska Uprava – SGU), Belgrade, which was founded in 1944, but whose origins go back to 1876, when a Geographical Section was established within the Serbian Army. By the 1920s an extensive program of triangulation and levelling was in progress and topographic map series at scales of 1:50,000 and 1:100,000 were in production. This ‘Parisian’ mapping (because it used the Paris meridian) remained of service until well after World War II. However, soon after the establishment of the new Institute in 1944, an entirely new program of topographic mapping began, using photogrammetric techniques and a new survey control network. The basic scale mapping for the whole of postwar Yugoslavia was 1:25,000, and the complete series of 3,029 sheets was issued between 1959 and 1968. There were subsequent revisions. Derived series were published at scales of 1:50,000, 1:100,000 and 1:200,000. A 1:500,000 scale series was linked to aeronautical charts and other thematic mapping, and three 1:1,000,000 scale sheets were produced in conformity with the International map of the World specification.

The sheet lines of these series are graticule-based and refer to the Greenwich Meridian. The maps are colored, and are gridded, with contours (20 m intervals for the larger scales), roads color classified and woodlands in green. The 1:500,000 series has hypsometric tints for relief.

A digital version of the 1:100,000 scale topographic map is in preparation, and in 1996 work began on a national digital base map at 1:5,000 scale. The work is being done by the Institute of Geodesy, in the Civil Engineering Faculty of the University of Belgrade. The military map series still form the basis for topographic maps in several of the newly independent Balkan Republics.

Soviet military topographic mapping of Serbia exists at the following scales: 1:1,000,000 (2 sheets, complete coverage, published 1981-1990); 1:500,000 (6 sheets, complete coverage, published 1978-1989); 1:200,000 (27 sheets, complete coverage, published 1976-1989); 1:100,000 (86 sheets, complete coverage, published 1976-1986); 1:50,000 (285 sheets, complete coverage, published 1972-1986) and city (1:10,000) topographic maps of Belgrade, Nis and Novi Sad published between 1975 and 1988. These products are available in print, digital raster and digital vector GIS formats from East View Geospatial.

Digital mapping within a geographical information systems framework has been carried out by several academic institutions. A water resources database for Serbia is being developed by the ‘Jaroslav Cerni‘ Water Resources Institute.

The Federal Geological Institute (Geoinstitut) in Belgrade has been responsible for an extensive standard series of 1:100,000 scale geological maps, and a number of 1:500,000 scale earth science maps have been published in the 1980s and 1990s.

The principal commercial cartographic publishing company is Izdavacka Ustanova Zavod za Kartografiju ‘Geokarta‘ (Geokarta), Belgrade, established in 1947. The company prepares a range of folded, road and tourist maps of the Balkans, city maps of Belgrade, general world and continental maps and also specializes in the production of school atlases, wall maps and other maps for educational use. Some maps are in Cyrillic and some use the Latin alphabet.

Many private publishers now located in the newly independent Balkan republics have contributed to the general and tourist mapping of the region. A useful indexed map covering the greater region is the Times map of the Western Balkans, and tourist maps by Freytag-Berndt (FB), Vienna and Kummerley and Frey (K+F), Bern, cover the whole of former Yugoslavia. The American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has also produced useful small scale general and thematic maps.